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Sunday, March 11, 2007

Sunday Poet: Pablo Neruda

I haven't done a Sunday Poet in a while, but I have been reading Pablo Neruda's Love Sonnets of late and thought I'd post a few here. I've been using his work as a model for the unconventional love sonnets that I began last weekend.

Before I loved you, Love, nothing was my own;I wavered through the streets, among objects:nothing mattered or had a name:the world was made of air, which waited.

I knew rooms full of ashes,tunnels where the moon lived,rough warehouses that growled Get lost,questions that insisted in the sand.

Everything was empty, dead, mute,fallen, abandoned, and decayed:inconceivably alien, it all

belonged to someone else-to no one:till your beauty and your povertyfilled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

Sonnet XLIV

You must know that I do not love and that I love you,because everything alive has its two sides;a word is one wing of silence,fire has its cold half.

I love you in order to begin to love you,to start infinity againand never to stop loving you:that's why I do not love you yet.

I love you, and I do not love you, as if I heldkeys in my hand: to a future of joy-a wretched, muddled fate-

My love has two lives, in order to love you:that's why I love you when I do not love you,and also why I love you when I do.

Sonnet XLV

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because-because-I don't know how to say it: a day is longand I will be waiting for you, as in an empty stationwhen the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, becausethen the little drops of anguish will all run together,the smoke that roams looking for a home will driftinto me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so farI'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

Sonnet XCIV

If I die, survive me with such a pure forceyou make the pallor and the coldness rage;flash your indelible eyes from south to south,from sun to sun, till your mouth sings like a guitar.

I don't want your laugh or your footsteps to waver;I don't want my legacy of happiness to die;don't call to my breast: I'm not there.Live in my absence as in a house.

Absence is such a large housethat you'll walk through the walls,hang pictures in sheer air.

Absence is such a transparent housethat even being dead I will see you there,and if you suffer, Love, I'll die a second time.

Sonnet LXXX

My Love, I returned from travel and sorrowto your voice, to your hand flying on the guitar,to the fire interrupting the autumn with kisses,to the night that circles through the sky.

I ask for bread and dominion for all;for the worker with no future ask for land.May no one expect my blood or my song to rest!But I cannot give up your love, not without dying.

So: play the waltz of the tranquil moon,the barcarole, on the fluid guitar,till my head lolls, dreaming:

for all my life's sleeplessness had woventhis shelter in the grove where your hand lives and flies,watching over the night of the sleeping traveler.

Sonnet LXXXI

And now you're mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.The night turns on its invisible wheels,and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,we will go together, over the waters of time.No one else will travel through the shadows with me,only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.

Your hands have already opened their delicate fistsand let their soft drifting signs drop away;your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move

after, following the folding water you carry, that carriesme away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.

Sonnet LXXXII

As we close this nocturnal door, my love,come with me, through the shadowy places.Close your dreams, Love, enter my eyes with your skies,spread out through my blood like a wide river.

Good-bye to cruel daylight, which droppedinto the gunneysack of the past, each day of it.Good-bye to every ray of watches or of oranges.O shadow, my intermittent friend, welcome!

In this ship, or water, or death, or new life,we are united again, asleep, resurrected:we are the night's marriage in the blood.

I don't know who it is who lives or dies, who rests or wakes,but it is your heart that distributesall the graces of the daybreak, in my breast.

Sonnet LXXXIII

It's good to feel you close in the night, Love,invisible in your sleep, earnestly nocturnal,while I untangle my confusionslike bewildered nets.